The Puppet Master: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 4

by Savage, Vivienne

  I meant to land. One moment, I’d been gathering my balance to put my feet beneath me; in the next, my quick descent hastened to meteoric speed. I rocketed toward her and collided with the vampire despite a point-blank wave of spellcraft washing over me. It struck my Prismatic Barrier with enough force to erode it instantaneously.

  But I hit her. It hurt as much as colliding with a steel wall.

  Tricia and I went tumbling across the field, each hit against the ground jostling me around like a rag doll, but I refused to release my grip on the traitorous bitch. Her sharp nails dragged down my face, one coming dangerously close to my left eye. Even then I didn't let up.

  She forced the matter via magic, throwing me back with a spell that made my blood feel like it was boiling in my skin. I screamed and brought my barrier back up around me, and the agony receded.

  “Sky!”

  “She’s using blood magic!” I yelled in warning. Or tried to. My voice came out as a pathetic wheeze instead.

  Guns against a vampire could be a lesson in futility, depending on the shooter. In the hands of a skilled opponent, there was a chance.

  For that reason alone, Gabriel didn't go against her with his handgun. It never even left the holster. Out of the sheath he carried for his grandfather's sword, Shōki gleamed beneath the moonlight. I never even saw him draw it. Carter had a stake in his hand, and the three of them were moving like a choreographed Hollywood martial arts scene, weaving in and out of the fight, snarling and hissing, though it was impossible to discern which of the three made which noise.

  Carter and Tricia moved like blurs, equally matched for speed. Despite lacking their vampiric speed, Gabriel made every blow count, timing them flawlessly. He struck out with cobra-quick reflexes and buried the blade in her chest—inches shy of where it needed to be.

  But that was blood lost, and blood was a vampire’s fuel.

  Tricia spun around behind him, streaming ribbons of blood in the air as he yanked the katana from her torso. Those ribbons came alive and wrapped tightly around Gabriel with the consistency of metal wire.

  “Fuck!”

  Instinct told me what to do. I transferred my Prismatic Barrier to Gabriel and severed the link between them. All at once, the living filament of blood went limp. Droplets splattered to the ground.

  Tricia merely turned her magic elsewhere, unfazed by my interference. Carter lifted into the air, arms out at his sides and head thrown back, every muscle in his body rigid with pain. The moment I raised my barrier in front of him, she turned back to Gabe.

  We had to get closer together if I was going to protect us all. She was forcing us into one group, not allowing us to come at her from different sides.

  “I can’t keep this up long, Gabe. And I can't attack at the same time as I’m defending.”

  “Then don't. We can't let her get away, so call down the damn sky."

  “Do it,” Tricia goaded me. "You'll risk their lives as much as you'll endanger mine. You ready for that?"

  “I’m ready to do whatever it takes to end you.”

  “Just like your masters want. You’re just a dog let off her chain whenever they send you into the city. Their perfect sacrificial lamb."

  Lightning leapt from my fingertips in a javelin of magic, but Tricia breezed out of the way. Carter went after her again, only for the vampire to catch a faceful of fire at close range. His shriek echoed in my ears.

  Gabriel charged in with Shōki blazing in the moonlight. I couldn't tell if it was actual magic from the sword or a clever illusion cast by Gabe to intimidate Tricia. Whichever it was, it worked, distracting Tricia enough to abandon her attack against Carter and go on the defensive. She backed away from Gabe, blocking each strike with what I could only describe as a blade of darkness. I couldn't see it clearly, their movements too fast, only a dark blur that seemed to absorb Shōki’s light.

  “You’re all disposable,” Tricia taunted. “It’s not too late to join us.”

  “And become a darkling? No thanks!” Gabriel snarled back at her as I rushed to Carter’s side.

  In no world did I ever imagine anyone lasting more than a few seconds against Gabriel with a sword, but she didn't need skill or his extensive training. The shadow blade bent and moved to her will, snaking around to always counter each precise slash of his weapon.

  “Do I look like a darkling?” she taunted. “You don’t have to be a darkling to join the Hidden Court.”

  Quickly, I smothered the flames that Carter hadn’t put out. Blisters covered his face and part of his cheek was practically missing in his Freddy Krueger-esque nightmare of scorched skin.

  Before I could ask if he was okay, he flipped up onto his feet again. A rapid transformation crept over the scorched tissue and restored his face like a time-lapse video.

  “You good?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t get through her defenses.”

  “Then defend Adrianna, in case she’s got help coming. If you can wake her up to help, even better.”

  “Got it.”

  Plan in place, we split up again and I moved in to assist Gabe with Faerie Fire. Tricia had her own shielding up, resulting in my spell parting around her like water around a rock.

  “Tsk-tsk, Skylar. You should know better by now, but they don’t teach you crap about fighting, do they? Not really. Because you’re just a pet project with a hero complex.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Sky.”

  “What, don't tell her the truth? Please. Like she doesn’t already know it. Girl, they’re only using you.”

  “You think Annalise isn’t using you? She made you ruin your life. You can’t ever go home; you can't show your face in the light of day without a squad of sentinels coming down on you. You’ve been a ghost in hiding for two years.”

  “Even now, they’re still keeping secrets from you. You think they told you everything? They haven’t. They never will. I don’t give a fuck about walking in the sunlight again.”

  “So why do this? Why help her if you have nothing to gain from it?” Distracting her was critical if I wanted through her shields. Unlike me, Tricia easily manipulated the currents of magic around her in defensive and offensive spellwork. Gabriel met my gaze, and I thought I heard him, though his mouth didn't move. A whistle snaking around me—an illusion?—urging me to open the sky.

  But if I did that, I’d put him in jeopardy as well.

  Tricia’s mouth curved into a cruel, fang-bearing smile. “To even the score. All this time, those stuck up snobs in Tir na Nog have been protected from the suffering in the rest of the world. Why should they have everything?”

  Distant sirens carried on the breeze. Backup would be here, but whether it'd be soon enough was another question. Tricia's grin only widened, making me doubt myself and our chances. She didn’t look like a woman cornered.

  My hesitation to use my greatest weapon gave her all the opportunity she needed to retreat. Tricia zipped away, a blur I could barely make out in the dark. Not Gabe, though. He took off after her, sheathing Shōki and unholstering his gun.

  Crack! Crack! Two shots were all he fired, but Tricia didn't slow down.

  Then another blur crashed into her, knocking Tricia off her intended path. She snarled and released a cacophonic burst of magic that hurled Carter down the street, right into Gabriel, and shattered every window on the block. Car alarms went off around us and the sudden appearance of so many flashing lights blinded me.

  “Fuck!” One split second of hesitation had cost us.

  One second.

  I wasted another, lingering long enough to determine both guys were alive before I hurtled after Tricia.

  “Corazzi to Cook County SBA. We’re in pursuit of Tricia O’Keefe!” I shouted into the radio, aware of Gabriel running beside me as I gave them coordinates and directions. “We need backup right now. Both of my partners are injured, and we have a disabled fae on our hands. We need assistance right away.”

  “Pursue her at all costs,” an unfami
liar voice came over the waves. “We’ve been chasing this bitch for months and can’t afford for her to get away.”

  “But—”

  “Do as I fucking said, junior sentinel.”

  Shit. It wasn’t Sebastian or Simon, but some other voice of authority shouting at us both. Gabriel clutched his ribs with one hand and nodded, grimacing in pain.

  Right. This was what being a sentinel was about. Following orders. We were the sword wielded by our superiors.

  Tricia’s taunts replayed in my head, causing me to stumble. Another precious second wasted. My side hurt and my lungs burned.

  We rounded the next corner and skidded to a halt. There was nothing. Tricia was nowhere to be seen.

  “Corazzi to CCSBA, we lost her on West 96th, heading west off South Parnell Avenue.”

  Another voice came over the radio. “Backup is on the way. Stay where you are.”

  “We need to get back to the student in the school field.”

  There was a pause on the line, during which Carter limped up to us. I shot him a disapproving glance, since he was supposed to have stayed with Adrianna, but said nothing. Neither did Gabriel. Not yet.

  “Remain where you are,” the dispatcher said again. “Units are on scene at the field and are processing the body.”

  An iron weight sank in my gut and I went cold.

  “Body?"

  “The fae is dead. They got her heart.”

  * * *

  Hours later, I still didn't understand what had happened at the park. Neither did the other sentinels involved. Gabriel, Carter, and I sat on a bench outside the CCSBA chief’s office, the silence between us dark as the grave.

  First the sergeant on shift accused Gabriel and me of negligence until Carter came to our rescue and swore up and down he’d also heard the voice over the radio ordering us to pursue Tricia at all costs, only joining us when he saw the lights of our backup on the scene. At the time, I'd been willing to believe they were risking Adrianna’s safety to secure the arrest of a dangerous fugitive.

  I hadn’t liked it, but I had orders to follow.

  Sentinels followed orders, refuting only those that placed the greater public in jeopardy. During my sentinel ethics class over the spring, we’d learned about the need to make difficult judgment calls and a list of criteria to take into account when forced to choose one life over another.

  During this course, I’d bristled. How much better were we than the bad guys if we chose to allow someone to die in front of us to close a case?

  “I swear I heard it too,” Carter muttered, finally breaking the silence. “That, and you guys calling for help.”

  “We never did that,: I said in a subdued voice. “Goddamned fucking illusions.”

  Gabriel released a heavy sigh and scrubbed a hand down his face. “I should have realized it wasn’t real.”

  “How could you? Those illusions were flawless. Masterful.”

  “I just… I should have known after all our encounters with the valravn.”

  Sebastian rounded the corner down the hall. “You can’t blame yourselves, guys. Sounds like a hell of a night.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” I mumbled.

  “No one can fault you for following orders. While Corazzi has a history of leaping into danger without thought, you don’t, Gabe.”

  I flushed to the tips of my ears. It was true. “I’ve gotten better about that.”

  “You have,” Sebastian agreed, “and they all know that as well. Plus Carter heard the same thing. No one is accusing you three of wrongdoing.”

  “Then why are we stuck here in the hallway like naughty children waiting to see the principal?” Carter asked.

  “You’re here because a lot of sentinels are struggling to tell Annalise’s fiction from reality at the moment, and they need as many sentinels in the office as possible to try to unravel this shit show."

  “We all saw the same thing,” Gabriel said, brows drawing into a frown.

  “Someone will have seen a crack through the illusion. That’s how it always works.”

  “We were the only three there,” I snapped, as angry at myself as the others. “Tricia was there and that’s the only person I saw.”

  Sebastian laid a hand on my shoulder. Usually I took comfort in the gesture, but not tonight. Tonight all I felt was that we had royally screwed up, and that we should have known better.

  “Remind me to tell you about the time Simon and I were given the slip by a nossie running rampant through Brooklyn, all because she laid a false trail.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. Like I said, no one here is in trouble.”

  “So what is the point of having us rehash the same thing over and over?” I demanded.

  Finally, the door opened and the chief stood in its frame, a brown-skinned older magician with salt-and-pepper shoulder-length braided hair and an imperious stare. Immediately, I doubted the veracity of Sebastian’s claims we weren’t in trouble.

  “C’mon, kids.”

  Kids? I started to bristle, then I remembered something. Gray hair on a mage typically meant older than a human’s great-great-grandfather old. He probably had a few Confederates under his belt.

  “What’s going on?” Carter asked.

  As a group, we wandered inside to find a woman seated on the floor, the pale hand emerging from her plum sleeve a striking contrast against the raven hair spilling from her hood.

  “Dire circumstances call for dire measures,” Chief Benson said. “With your consent, we’d like to take a little blood.”

  Gabriel stared. “You want to do blood magic?”

  “Not exactly,” said the blood witch. She pushed back her hood, pale face staring up at us. “Trust me. I have no desire to have the foul taste of raven in my mouth.”

  My thoughts flashed to Holly and to how she’d been moody since casting a blood magic spell last year. Not only moody, but reliant on magic for simple things. It wasn’t something most mages took lightly.

  “Is this a good idea?”

  “It’s not blood magic in the sense that you’re thinking,” Carter spoke up. “Like she said, not exactly. It’s vampiric blood magic, an advanced technique some of our best can perform. Projecting a blood memory is the difficult part and requires serious training and ability. Otherwise there can be some harmful side effects to the vamp. Like, legit harmful, dude. Persistent nightmares and difficulty telling reality apart from lingering visions. Works best when the vampire is a wizard too.”

  “Kindly take a seat and extend your index fingers,” the chief directed. An aide stepped up beside him with a needle to draw blood and despite my best efforts, my stomach went a little queasy. I could face down an angry wendigo, but needles squicked me out.

  I sucked in a breath and watched a needle prick Gabriel first. One by one they pricked each of us and squeezed a small sample from our fingertips.

  The blood magician sighed. “I loathe this,” she muttered, before popping the sample stick with Gabriel's blood into her mouth. When she did, the world around us warped and changed, blinding light shimmering over my vision, then darkness descending. I jumped and stumbled back, feeling a chair I couldn't see.

  It was surreal. I knew Gabriel was seated to my left, and that Sebastian and the chief were standing about four feet across from me, but I couldn't see any of them.

  Instead, I watched as Gabe, Carter, and I came across Tricia and Adrianna. The whole scene played out, pretty much exactly as I remembered it. Nothing stood out as wrong. And when it was over, the visions wavered and the room returned to normal.

  Then the mage took my sample and a shiver ran up my spine when her pupils dilated and she trembled. Not that I knew from experience, but we'd always been told that the closest human comparison to fae blood was the drug ecstasy.

  Before I could think too much about it, the room vanished again and we were back at the scene, but in my memories this time.

  It seemed typical of what I recalled, nothing ou
t of place. We moved from my point of view while my physical body was still, fighting and gliding over the park grounds. The shouts were loud in my ears, and—there, on the left, I saw it, a shadow gliding from the sky like a black kite coming down to Earth. In my memory, dispatch ordered us to leave.

  No, I thought desperately, wishing we could go back in time.

  Annalise. It had to be. She had been there and we hadn't seen it, so damn focused on Tricia.

  Viewing the memory this way, I noticed something else, too. The radio didn’t light up. We hadn’t gotten any call, but since we were running after Tricia, that was something anyone would have missed.

  “Did you all see that?”

  “We do,” Sebastian's voice carried over. “Excellent illusion work. She knows how sentinel dispatchers work.”

  “Could she be a former sentinel?” I asked. “I mean, her being a raven shifter doesn’t mean she has to be a sentinel, right?”

  “It’s possible," Gabriel confirmed, voice grim. “Sam didn’t want to work for the SBA. But all of us go through the same rigid training up until the day we graduate. She could be familiar with procedure that way.”

  The memory disintegrated around us and revealed the room again. Our mage stared at me with an intensity that sent ice cubes crawling down my spine. The moment ended as she tasted the final sample from Carter.

  This time some of the memory was different. I watched Gabe and I take off after Tricia while Carter stayed with Adrianna and tried to rouse her. In the distance there were sirens, and then, just as ours had, Carter’s radio went off.

  “Carter, she has us pinned down!” Gabriel's voice barked over the frequency.

  A moment later a cry echoed across the field and I recognized my own voice screaming in pain. Carter hesitated, clearly torn between leaving Adrianna and helping us, but approaching sirens and flashing lights heralded back-up’s arrival. So he whooshed off, arriving just as I recalled he had, rushing Tricia with his vampiric speed.

  “On the roof to the right,” Gabriel said. The real Gabe.